Summary: Image-Space-Parallel Direct Volume Rendering
on a Cluster of PCs
B. Barla Cambazoglu and Cevdet Aykanat
Bilkent University, Department of Computer Engineering,
06800, Ankara, Turkey
{berkant,aykanat}@cs.bilkent.edu.tr
Abstract. An image-space-parallel, ray-casting-based direct volume
rendering algorithm is developed for rendering of unstructured data grids
on distributed-memory parallel architectures. For efficiency in screen
workload calculations, a graph-partitioning-based tetrahedral cell clus-
tering technique is used. The main contribution of the work is at the
proposed model, which formulates the screen partitioning problem as a
hypergraph partitioning problem. It is experimentally verified on a PC
cluster that, compared to the previously suggested jagged partitioning
approach, the proposed approach results in both better load balancing
in local rendering and less communication overhead in data migration
phases.
1 Introduction
In many scientific simulations, data is located at the vertices (data points) of a
3D grid that represents the physical environment. Unstructured datasets are a